Tabular measure groups and dimension processing - tabular

I have a Tabular cube and i built an SSIS flow for incremental measure group processing using XMLA script. The script states the MeasureGroupID to process.
I have a Fact_Volume table in my tabular model, and the Fact_Volume table contains different measures and attribute fields (used for slicing).
I don't understand if the processing of the measure group using XMLA script is enough for both measures and attributes in Fact_Volume or do i also have to process the Fact_Volume as a dimension in the SSIS Analysis Services Processing Task Editor component?
[Analysis Services Processing Task Editor]
Thanks!

You should avoid using the SSIS Analysis Services Processing Task for processing Tabular models, as the notion of "dimension", "attributes", etc. does not really make sense.
Instead, use SSMS to generate a Process script for the objects you need to process incrementally (tables or partitions), and put the generated XMLA code into an Analysis Services Execute DDL task within your SSIS package.
When processing a table (or one or more partitions of a table), you generally do not need to do any processing of other objects, unless you have calculated columns in your model, that depend on the data in the table that was just processed. In that case, you should perform a Process Calculate on the entire model after the table has been processed.

Related

Processing grouped data in Lookup+Foreach activity in ADF

I am looking for an ADF solution to introduce workload management for a metadata driven ingestion system.
In the pipeline, I read data from some metadata table into a lookup activity and say the data looks something like this
ObjectName,Tshirtsize,TaskGroup,IncrementalLoadFlag,InitialLoadFlag
Asset1,Large,1,N,Y
Asset2,Large,1,N,Y
Asset3,Large,1,N,Y
Asset4,Small,2,N,Y
Now I have to process this data in a foreach in sequential manner based on the value of TaskGroup, as in my first batch, I need to process the 3 tables which has the same TaskGroup and copy them asynchronously after determining the load flags.
However as far as I have seen foreach it will iterate every item of the lookup output one after the another and as a result I am not able to iterate on the grouped data (based on TaskGroup) for bulk load.
Is there a solution how this scenario can be implemented?

Azure Data Factory Input dataset with sqlReaderQuery as source

We are creating Azure Data Factory pipeline using .net API. Here we are providing input data source using sqlReaderQuery. By this mean, this query can use multiple table.
So problem is we can't extract any single table from this query and give tableName as typeProperty in Dataset as shown below:
"typeProperties": {
"tableName": "?"
}
While creating dataset it throws exception as tableName is mandatory. We don't want to provide tableName in this case? Is there any alternative of doing the same?
We are also providing structure in dataset.
Unfortunately you cant do that natively. You need to deploy a Dataset for each table. Azure Data Factory produce slices for every activity ahead of execution time. Without knowing the table name, Data Factory would fail when producing these input slices.
If you want to read from multiple tables, then use a stored procedure as the input to the data set. Do your joins and input shaping in the stored procedure.
You could also get around this by building a dynamic custom activity that operates, say, at the database level. When doing this you would use a dummy input dataset and a generic output data set and control most of the process yourself.
It is a bit of a nuisance this property being mandatory, particularly if you have provided a ...ReaderQuery. For Oracle copies I have used sys.dual as the table name, this is a sort of built-in dummy table in Oracle. In SQL Server you could use one of the system views or set up a dummy table.

Azure Data Factory Data Migration

Not really sure this is an explicit question or just a query for input. I'm looking at Azure Data Factory to implement a data migration operation. What I'm trying to do is the following:
I have a No SQL DB with two collections. These collections are associated via a common property.
I have a MS SQL Server DB which has data that is related to the data within the No SQL DB Collections via an attribute/column.
One of the NoSQL DB collections will be updated on a regular basis, the other one on a not so often basis.
What I want to do is be able to prepare a Data Factory pipline that will grab the data from all 3 DB locations combine them based on the common attributes, which will result in a new dataset. Then from this dataset push the data wihin the dataset to another SQL Server DB.
I'm a bit unclear on how this is to be done within the data factory. There is a copy activity, but only works on a single dataset input so I can't use that directly. I see that there is a concept of data transformation activities that look like they are specific to massaging input datasets to produce new datasets, but I'm not clear on what ones would be relevant to the activity I am wanting to do.
I did find that there is a special activity called a Custom Activity that is in effect a user defined definition that can be developed to do whatever you want. This looks the closest to being able to do what I need, but I'm not sure if this is the most optimal solution.
On top of that I am also unclear about how the merging of the 3 data sources would work if the need to join data from the 3 different sources is required but do not know how you would do this if the datasets are just snapshots of the originating source data, leading me to think that the possibility of missing data occurring. I'm not sure if a concept of publishing some of the data someplace someplace would be required, but seems like it would in effect be maintaining two stores for the same data.
Any input on this would be helpful.
There are a lot of things you are trying to do.
I don't know if you have experience with SSIS but what you are trying to do is fairly common for either of these integration tools.
Your ADF diagram should look something like:
1. You define your 3 Data Sources as ADF Datasets on top of a
corresponding Linked service
2. Then you build a pipeline that brings information from SQL Server into a
temporary Data Source (Azure Table for example)
3. Next you need to build 2 pipelines that will each take one of your NoSQL
Dataset and run a function to update the temporary Data Source which is the ouput
4. Finally you can build a pipeline that will bring all your data from the
temporary Data Source into your other SQL Server
Steps 2 and 3 could be switched depending on which source is the master.
ADF can run multiple tasks one after another or concurrently. Simply break down the task in logical jobs and you should have no problem coming up with a solution.

Can i upload data from multiple datasources to azure DW at same time

Can i retrieve data from multiple data sources to Azure SQL DataWarehouse at the same time using single pipeline?
SQL DW can certainly load multiple tables concurrently using external (aka PolyBase) tables, bcp, or insert statements. As hirokibutterfield asks, are you referring to a specific loading tool like Azure Data Factory?
Yes you can, but there you have to mention a copy activity for each of the data source being copied to the azure data warehous.
Yes you can, and depending on the extent of transformation required, there would be 2 ways to do this. Regardless of the method, the data source does not matter to ADF since your data movement happens via the copy activity which looks at the dataset and takes care of firing the query on the related datasource.
Method 1:
If all your transformation for a table can be done in a SELECT query on the source systems, you can have a set of copy activities specifying SELECT statements. This is the simple approach
Method 2:
If your transformation requires complex integration logic, first use copy activities to copy over the raw data from the source systems to staging tables in the SQLDW instance (Step 1). Then use a set of stored procedures to do the transformations (Step 2).
The ADF datasets which are the output from Step1 will be input datasets to Step 2 in order to maintain consistency.

How do I process data that isn't sliced by time in Azure Data Factory?

So I am trying to use Azure Data Factory to replace the SSIS system we have in place, and I am having some trouble...
The process I want to follow is to take a list of projects and a list of clients and create a report of the clients and projects we have. These lists update frequently, so I want to update this report every hour. To combine the data, I will be using Power BI Pro, so Data Factory just needs to load the data into a usable format.
My source right now is a call to an API that returns a list of projects. However, this data isn't separated by time at all. I don't see any sort of history. Same goes for the list of clients.
What should the availability for my dataset be?
you may use the custom activity in ADF to call the API that returns list of projects. The custom activity will then write that data in the right format to the destination.
Example of a custom activity in ADF: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/data-factory-use-custom-activities/
The frequency will be the cadence at which you wish to run this operation.

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